Current weather

A little respect for others would be appreciated

In today’s society, it seems like more and more people are respecting others less and less. All they care about is themselves. If someone else works hard to do something nice, they have no problem destroying their hard work, and enjoying themselves in the process. I have a couple good examples of this:

I live in Nikiski, and we travel on Miller Loop Road a lot. Recently, a construction crew completed some dirtwork on the right-hand side of the road. A bunch of trees had to be cleared, and the ground was left in a muddy mess. After the work was done, the company planted grass to cover the muddy ground. The grass progressed nicely, until a couple of days ago when I noticed that someone had driven their four-wheeler on the newly sprouted grass. Whoever it was had a heyday. The grass was all torn up, and there were tracks from where the driver of the four-wheeler had spun around in circles in an effort to destroy something nice. It wasn’t like they didn’t have anywhere else to ride either. There is still an ATV trail right next to the grass. So, this means that whoever did this did it deliberately.

My family and I participate in the community cleanup every year. We pick up bags upon bags full of garbage. Most of what we pick up is fast food containers, and empty soda cans. It would seem that whoever throws the stuff out would be able to wait until they got to the nearest trash can, but they don’t. I remember a couple years ago, we were picking up trash along Island Lake Road when this car came flying down the road in a 35 MPH speed zone. They looked over at us, and then threw a piece of garbage out their window. Then, last year, after we had worked for a full day picking up other people’s garbage, we set the garbage bags up on the side of the road to be picked up by the trash truck. The next day as my mama was on her way to the dump, she noticed that some of the bags of trash had been split wide open by someone driving along on a Friday night. A lot of the trash we had picked up had to be gathered up again — not to mention several newly emptied beer bottles.

I am writing this in hopes that some of these people will read this and think twice before they throw that empty soda can out their window, or deliberately destroy something someone has made nice.